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Spencer Levy
Some real estate investors favor the potential upside of high risk. Some like to mine for gold in distressed assets or hedge their bets in other ways. Then there are those who find success simply by favoring sound fundamentals. On this episode, we revisit an asset type that's all about the fundamentals -- self storage -- to gauge how aspects such as solid recurring revenue and long term thinking have been the key to navigating cyclical economic changes.
Liz Schlesinger
There's not many businesses that I know of that can essentially lose 15% of their demand, while also having supply coming along, and do as well as we've done.
Spencer Levy
That's Liz Schlesinger, Co-Founder and CEO of Merit Hill Capital, a firm she opened in 2016 after a decade of investing in self storage at W. P. Carey. Liz says she and her team have evaluated more than 6.000 deals and 10,000 properties, with a total asset value of more than $30 billion. She'll reveal more about the numbers in her corner of the world and Merit Hill’s National Portfolio.
Nick Walker
It used to be one of those things where it was a small dollar amount and hard to operate. To get a business of scale was a lot of work. Now, it's still smaller transaction volume, but they can buy it, they can turn it over to a very good operator.
Spencer Levy
And that's Nick Walker, Vice Chairman of CBRE’s Self Storage Capital Markets Group. Nick's family has been involved in the self storage industry since 1984, and he now leads a CBRE National Practice with, he says, deals or potential deals in up to 40 states across the country. Coming up, going beyond the basics and unpacking the business of self storage. I'm Spencer Levy, and that's right now on The Weekly Take.
Spencer Levy
Welcome to The Weekly Take. And we are delighted to be welcoming back Liz Schlesinger, CEO of Merit Hill Capital. Liz, welcome back.
Liz Schlesinger
Thanks so much, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
And then our old friend Nick Walker, Vice Chairman, CBRE. Leads CBRE’s Self Storage practice. Also a repeat guest. Nick, thanks for coming back to the show.
Nick Walker
Thanks for having me.
Spencer Levy
Liz, I know you've been on the show before, and for those who didn't hear the first time you were here, which was about four years ago, tell us who you are and what you do.
Liz Schlesinger
Sure. Merit Hill Capital is an investment firm that buys self storage across the U.S. We currently have 403 properties, 24.98 million square feet across 38 states. And we believe that from an investment approach, you cannot time the market. And it's really important to start with a fundamentally sound, good business, which self storage is. And as a result, we are investing in every market, scouring the entire U.S., all of the possible deals. We've looked at 10,256 properties in 6171 separate deals, and we've purchased 495 properties in 325 separate deals. And we've basically then bought about 5.2% of our properties. I know it sounds a little nitpicky and detail oriented, but to me, the most important thing about investing is being maniacal about data and making sure that you're using data to your advantage, and not just hope and a prayer that this deal is going to work.
Spencer Levy
Self storage is kind of niche. It's small: 5, 6% of the core space. So Liz, for the uninitiated in our audience, why self storage?
Liz Schlesinger
Self storage is a business I fell in love with in 2006, and I still think it is one of the best businesses I've ever come across. And the primary reason is that we have very strong, sticky tenants, and we don't have the same dependance on any one customer because each individual storage facility has about 400 units and therefore 400 customers. That is what creates the recession “resistant” and the durability of the cash flow. And then additionally, you can build a portfolio on a relative basis with the same amount of equity as you could other portfolios and get more diversification because the individual asset sizes in storage are much smaller. So you get better geographic diversity and investment diversity in the asset class. And each property has very limited CapEx. Relatively easy to… as a rule of thumb, we can get 65, 70% margins, and able to grow that income pretty incredibly because it's month to month leases, which provides a nice inflation hedge. And they're relatively low dollar amounts.
Spencer Levy
Nick, you and your family have been in this business for over 40 years, but only recently, I'd say in the last ten years, have we seen a huge inflow of institutional capital coming into this sector. What changed?
Nick Walker
I think there's two reasons as to where they discovered self storage, so to speak. I think when they looked back at how the storage handled the GFC compared to all asset classes, I think that put self storage on everyone's radar. And then at the same time, the biggest barrier to entry into self storage was the operational aspect of it. And coming out of the GFC, that's when you saw some of the largest operators today that do third party management started their third party management platform. And so it used to be one of those things where it was a small dollar amount and hard to operate. To get a business to scale was a lot of work. Now, it's still smaller transaction volume, but they can buy it, they can turn it over to a very good operator. And hopefully they get those increases on the income and durability of the cash flow, and not have to worry about mucking up their own deal by trying to self operate. And so I think from an institutional perspective, those are two of the biggest things that I think got them into our sector in the last 10 to 15 years.
Spencer Levy
Rewinding the tape, four years ago, when you're first on the show, Liz, I think it's fair to say self storage may have been the number one sub-asset class in the country, or operational asset class. It was super hot, big institutional money going into it, lots of transaction volume, in part because fundamentally it was in a great place. Things have weakened in the last four years in the sector, fundamentally. Nevertheless, a lot of money is still chasing it. Liz, where is the business today? How's it going and how has it changed over the last four years?
Liz Schlesinger
There's no question that we had tailwinds then. We have a lot of headwinds now. I think the reality is it's still a fundamentally good business. And I really do believe that that's an important part of why we're doing okay now, despite that. The lack of moving in the home sector has hurt us. 50% of our demand is generated from moving. 15% of that demand is generated from homeowners moving. 35%, therefore, is renter-related moving. And as you probably know, there's been an increase, also, in renewals of leases for multi-family. So that lack of demand generated by churn of people moving around has definitely hurt the sector, and was what was actually helping it during the time you were talking about before. Having said that, we are also seeing that same lack of moving and also the lack of housing affordability driving a significant increase in length of stay of our customers, and therefore a significant increase in the value of each customer. You see that customers who are staying more than 24 months, which really are the most valuable customers, are staying on average 13% longer than customers did before. And that has generated demand. Despite the fact that we're not getting as many rentals, those customers are essentially becoming… one customer is almost two customers now in our facilities. So it has been providing a decent floor for occupancy and the space overall. We did have a lot of supply that was absorbed more than it would have been had Covid not happened right after that build up in supply. And because supply has a lag, we also have had more deliveries than you would have expected over the last three years come online. I think those two supply-demand challenges have absolutely created a difficult situation. But if you look at the public REITs, who've now had their first negative same store NOI since 2010, it's still only moderately down, and I think that speaks to the resiliency of the asset class and the fact that we still do have demand drivers independent of any cycle we're in. And also just the strength of the overall property type, that it can withstand this type of challenge. There's not many businesses that I know of that can essentially lose 15% of their demand, while also having supply coming along, and do as well as we've done.
Spencer Levy
What you're suggesting is, while you may have gotten significantly weaker on incrementally new customers, your existing customers have stayed stickier, which has helped the NOI boost. But is that a fair way to sum it up?
Liz Schlesinger
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
Spencer Levy
I made the comment that four years ago may have been the best year ever for self storage, in just the beginning of Covid, but it's gotten tougher, a lot tougher from a capital markets perspective. But Nick, you lead our practice. Tell us what you think.
Nick Walker
Yeah, I think generally over the last 24 months it has been a down market from an overall activity perspective. We thought that there might be a little bit of a bounce back in 2024. It never really materialized, but we did notice that the fourth quarter of ‘24, we saw a large pickup. And so like our NDA activity from a quarter over quarter perspective for 2024, from Q1 to Q2, we saw an 8.9% pickup in NDA activity on the listings. And from Q2 to Q3, it was almost 26%. And then it was about another 8% from Q3 to Q4, which is when you saw a lot more activity get done. Offers were showing up where we started to get back into the double digits on most of our listings, where there was 15 to 20 offers now starting to show up. I think you're going to start seeing a lot larger deals transact and happen in ‘25, where there was a few, I'd say, larger deals, but nothing like what occurred in ‘21 and ‘22, where you saw multiple billion dollar transactions happen. So you're going to start seeing more and more of that as it picks up. And the capital that seems to be the most active right now seems to be in the core plus vehicles. Core will do some larger deals, but I would say it's capped out at 150 million to start. I think as the year goes on, I think as their redemptions expire or roll off, as the capital fundraising starts to tick back up, which they have all made commentary that that does appear to be the case, I think you're going to see them try to buy some much bigger deals and transaction volumes will go up.
Spencer Levy
So for our listeners, let's just define a little bit more what you would define as a core deal versus a core plus deal in terms of location and yield.
Nick Walker
On a core deal, I would tell you it's probably in the top 25 to 30 MSAs. It's a newer product type. Class A is what we call more vertical. So it's a 3 or 4 story building. It's been built 2015 on. It's a stabilized asset at what they would consider market rents. Usually we find that most of those deals are larger operated stores or REIT managed stores. And returns on those from a core capital perspective is a high single digit return.
Spencer Levy
That's a leveraged return?
Nick Walker
A levered return. Correct.
Spencer Levy
Okay. And what would it be unlevered?
Nick Walker
I think going into that would probably be in that, call it, 5 to 6% return.
Spencer Levy
Okay. So you are seeing, for the best self storage deals in the best submarkets, five handles.
Nick Walker
We're actually… Spencer, we've closed a couple of transactions for some core stuff that was sub five. It was high fours.
Liz Schlesinger
I think the most shocking thing of what Nick said to me is that people are willing to buy stabilized rents, negative leverage. So we buy things typically like for our fifth fund, we're buying four caps but they're stabilized 10% plus market yields, right? You do that because you are comfortable with the spread of the stabilized market yield relative to where your debt, close to debt, is, where treasuries are. And I can tell you that the dynamic in 2023 we saw… When you look at our market yields for 2023, because we were almost the only buyer out there, relative to where five year treasuries were, the only other time I've seen that spread be as wide as it was was actually in early 2020, during the beginning of Covid, before it was clear that storage was going to outperform and lenders and everyone was really scared to death.
Nick Walker
I think what they're saying is look, we know what we're buying today, and if we can't do it that much greater, are we comfortable with where we're at? Although I do think that they are projecting that later in the next couple of years, they are expecting outsized rent growth in those marketplaces because less competition has been built in those marketplaces, and they're getting to ride the wave. That's what their bet is on some of those funds, is where they're looking at and going, hey, we are at the bottom of what we believe the rents are in this marketplace, and so are we okay with this leverage? And then how do you pro forma what you think it's going to get to? You know, what's going to be the justification for that? And they can go back and look at trends. But I think that they would have to go back in those marketplaces and kind of look at pre-COVID trends to make an assumption moving forward. And I think that's what we get feedback-wise from some of these groups.
Liz Schlesinger
And it's really kind of incredible when you think of where storage is as an asset class and how well accepted it is because of its resiliency and strong cash flow, high margins, these dynamics, no CapEx. It's driven so much interest in it that you can find buyers who are willing to do negative levered deals in core funds. They like it enough that they're willing to make that macro bet. I mean, I think that speaks a lot to the strength of the asset class.
Spencer Levy
Well Liz, let's go back to your investing style for just a moment. What are you looking to get as a going in yield? And what are you looking for a stabilized yield?
Liz Schlesinger
We'd like to get a higher yield than we're able to get going in. So I think when I started investing in storage in 2006, you could get really interesting in-place cap rates with room to grow, right? So like ideally we could get that. Everyone knows now that there are these sites that are under-managed, and so getting those for a six cap when they're significantly under-managed relative to market rents. I love investors that say, like, how does this happen where someone owns a site and they're charging, say, $10 a foot in-place and the market achieved rent is $15 a foot in place? And I said, well, they're getting paid for that risk now. They used to maybe not be. And also, in candor, I don't think we realize we can necessarily get to 15 in 2006. You know, I don't think we were assuming we could. But now that people understand that dynamic, you know, a lot of times these people have friends in the community. They own the facility. They've had it forever. They have great in-place cash flow. And they'd rather keep their occupancy where it is and not have the headache of churning, right? And the bottom line is, they're absolutely not stupid. I think that's the one real underestimation of new people to this space. The devil is in the details. The mom and pops who have been in this space for a long time are smarter than anyone who got in after that, right? And so they know what they're doing, in part because Nick and others, and the sellers, know they're under-rented and they're getting paid for that, and they're not taking the risk of it, right? So what we're doing is we're buying these sites at roughly four caps in-place, so it is negative levered, but we're buying them off of… And then particularly in 2023 we got some incredible yields. But this is for being direct, and we're going to have a lot more competition. But we got like ten plus market yields. We don't model them to hit that. We assume over the five year term we'll get to maybe an eight in-place stabilized cap rate. But we know we have run room beyond that. And to me, investing is about mitigating risk and assuming that you're going to make some mistakes, so you have some wiggle room if you do. And that's how we try to buy. It's not easy. Like I mentioned, we've looked at what, 10,256 properties. We only bought 5.2% of the properties that we've looked at over the last, you know, eight years.
Spencer Levy
I think one of the things that I'd like to dig a little bit deeper into is something that was said while we were taping an episode of The Weekly Take with Jamie Hodari, who is now the CEO of a big part of our company dealing with operations and excellence. And he said, “all real estate now is, quote, operational” and meaning that it used to be there were the big four asset classes: office, industrial, multifamily, and retail. Those were the, for lack of a better way of putting it, a box of bonds where you would have a long term lease, set it and forget it. That was the perception. He said, no, that doesn't exist anymore. You need to operate it more. Self storage was always in the operational asset class because your leases are what, one month? And the tenants will churn and the rents are constantly moving. But at the same time, I'm going to say something that maybe counter to your ears. I think self-storage may be less operational than office, because of the low fit-out cost. And I'm not saying that the tenants are not unique in and of themselves, but they're more generic, kind of like a multifamily tenant, then it would be an office tenant. So any reaction to that?
Liz Schlesinger
I think it's absolutely correct. Certainly much less risk. I mean, you know, when you think about diversification of customer, we have 160,000 customers across our portfolio. So I mean, that's the genius of the business, right? You say these things like people like to say risk return is so great. What does that actually mean? The risk that we're taking is materially less than office. Just because it's operational intensive or not, doesn't necessarily mean it's a good investment, right? I mean, like what you're defining on the office side does seem like a much bigger headache if that's how you want to define operations. But I do think it's more operationally intense on the leasing side and all of the negotiations of that lease, absolutely. Now, of course, the hope is that tenant stays for five years. And so it's not a month to month dealing with a customer. And also like I will note that like there are customers who are higher touch point in self-storage facilities. We have landscapers, farmer reps, like we do have customers that are coming in every day. But I do think from that lens, it's not nearly as operationally intense if, say, you're an asset management group at a big real estate shop in New York City. You're probably busier than you would be if you're an asset manager of potentially our asset class. Not if you're the property manager, though. The property managers in self-storage are dealing with a lot of movement, of activity, of customers. And I do think that's pretty intense. It might be the same, might fit more of the same box, but it is quite a bit of volume.
Nick Walker
Look, I don't know if it's more or less. I think there's definitely parts where, you know, it's a lot less. A tenant moves out… we need a $3 broom to get the unit rent ready again, right? And in an office you may have a tremendous amount of TI. So on that front, we're a lot less intensive than they would. But that lease is already structured for five years in the office or whatever the lease is with rents and what the escalations are going to be and everything else. With storage, you know, it's month to month. It means that we can do a lot higher what we call existing customer rent increases: ECRIs. We can move them, which at what we've seen in the last couple of years, Liz, let me know if you agree, but our pace of ECRIs are much faster than they have ever been. And the percentage of increases are significantly higher than what they were historically. And so from that operational standpoint, because you have, like Liz says, 160,000 customers, we're talking about moving every 4 to 9 months depending, you know, giving them all ECRIs. Some are going to… most stay, some move out. Then you have that churn of tenants and that, whereas the operational side, I think is a lot higher and more intense in storage than what you get in some of those office buildings.
Spencer Levy
I think the issue with self storage is just too small from the standpoint of if you're a core fund, and I think, Nick, you threw out the number 5, 6% of allocation is to self storage. Well, that's probably all it can handle in terms of its relative size to some of these other sub-asset classes that are taking the place of office. And there's only so many self storage units, there's only so many data centers, so much SFR, BTR, single family rental, BTR, that could pick up the slack. So it's a great space, but it's still relatively small as compared to the others.
Liz Schlesinger
Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's why you're getting the deal Nick describes. There's not a lot of supply of storage in that realm for core plus funds. So it's creating the ability to get things sold at negative leverage that wouldn't exist if there wasn't that demand relative to how much storage exists. I think it's only about $235 billion of storage in the top 50 MSAs, relative to like $8 trillion of real estate in those top 50 MSAs, right? So like, absolutely, it's a real challenge. Making it sort of a poor asset class has created pricing pressure.
Spencer Levy
To get to critical mass. And I think, Nick, what would you say the average price of a storage facility? Is it 15, $20 million? Smaller?
Nick Walker
I mean, I think that the core stuff in those marketplace, 15 to $25 million.
Spencer Levy
And then the value-add product that Liz, you're buying a little bit smaller than that?
Liz Schlesinger
Yeah. 5 to 10 million. I mean I will say on that note, our deal sizes have gone down over time because of the competition. So we've just had to work harder. I've had this conversation with various peers in the space. I think returns overall likely will be going down for real estate from all of the things that you're talking about. But I think that small deals… like, you have to get paid for the work you're doing, right? And it's much harder to buy storage and to build a storage portfolio of the same value as it is for an office facility. Maybe now it's harder to deal with an office facility once you owned it, but the absolute actual work to get those deals is higher, and therefore I don't see how the returns can't ultimately be higher in storage because people need to get paid for that extra work, if you will. If you think about storage…. If I were focused on a GP and the profits of like actually Merit Hill Capital, which I'm not, fortunately, it's not the smartest business to be in as an investment manager, right? We only put about 200 million of equity to work a year, and I have an 11 person investment team, right? Like that's not the same economies of scale that a Blackstone may be getting, right, in terms of the dollar value of the deal. And the reason I do that is, one, the founder of Bill Carey always told me, you can always get money for a good deal. So if you focus on good deals and doing the right thing by your investors and getting good returns, you will be able to raise money for that, right? And that is ultimately what an investor should be seeking. Focusing on the actual returns for the investors, not their own profit of the GP. And the other thing is, is that we have much higher returns than you're going to get on those big deals as a result. So once those high returns go away, I just don't see the motivation to do that level of digging and work, right?
Spencer Levy
Let's switch now and talk a little bit about market dynamics. There are few asset classes that I think are as hyper-local as self storage. I mean, you're down to the block. And I think, Liz, four years ago you said people like to be able to see their storage unit from their apartment. So talk about these hyper-local dynamics. When you’re looking at a storage unit, are you looking at Manhattan or you're looking at these two blocks of Manhattan. Are you looking at the two blocks in Brooklyn, versus any other markets? Talk about the hyper-locality of this asset type.
Liz Schlesinger
Yeah, I mean, I think that's absolutely right. The actual radius depends on where you are. So if you're in more of a tertiary area, that radius of competition that you're looking at is more like a ten mile radius potentially. But generally speaking, people want to be within 15 minutes of their stuff. There's a connection to the stuff, even if they're not going to see it or going to the facility as often is in their head they think they will be. They want to be in close proximity to their stuff. And that's why the clutter model didn't work, along with very expensive pricing and all of the other dynamics of that. It didn't work for consumers because they wanted to be able to know they put their stuff in a unit, they see it, they go away, and it's there. And I think that drives the reason why storage has been so strong in these tertiary markets. There's less of a concern, I think, for the value of that cash flow in the storage industry than there is for other asset classes. And I would also say one of the really unique things about storage, and that we really play off of, is there's not as much of a discrepancy between a really crappy, maybe that's not the right way to describe it, but a really lower, sort of a class C storage facility and a class A storage facility, right? Because ultimately people want clean, secure facilities near their homes, more than they care about a three storey drive up climate control with all the bells and whistles. It's just not what's driving the customer. And so that's why you can make money in storage in a way that's much harder in other asset classes, by focusing on cost per foot, and by buying some of these older facilities, you don't have to worry about the obsolescence risk in the same regard, because it's absolutely like what you say. It's about being close to the customer above all else.
Nick Walker
I think the perception of the value of people's items have not really changed since 1984, when my family got into the business. The Legos that you grew up on that your mom kept, or every letter that you wrote her for, you know, Valentine's Day that she held on to… that value, whether that's a material dollar amount, the perception of what that is worth has not really changed. So people want to hold on to that stuff. But to Liz’s point, it's not like a hotel business where you go to a Motel 6 and you go to a Marriott. There's a big difference in the nightly rate, but within storage, within the same vicinity, if you've got a 70s vintage storage that's somewhat clean, somewhat well lit, has some of the security, and you have the newer built facility right down the road that has a lot of those, but just, you know, nicer, a little bit cleaner, the rate is not what that delta is like in other asset classes. And so to Liz’s point, you don't have to own the class A facility in every market. You can get a older facility. There's things you can do to it. I mean you can change the lighting, you can change the security. You can paint it. And it's not something that you're doing every day. You're doing it every 10 or 15 years. And you'd be surprised, but you can remodel the office, and then the perception and what you're delivering product wise to the customer, you're delivering them that box, that 10 by 10 unit. It's on either side. And if it looks nice and it feels clean, the rents will be there for you.
Liz Schlesinger
And the irony is, what sector could you find that people are developing assets that people actually prefer less. So customers do not want the third floor elevator unit. They actually want the drive up unit. But the land value in most of the places that developers are building it now forces them to do these three story climate control buildings. It's not like customers are forcing that. Customers would prefer if you've got a well-lit, clean box that's drive up, they will pay more for that than they will for a unit in the back of a fancy new building that they've got to take an elevator to. I mean, you can imagine why. I mean, you don't want to lug all your stuff on a little cart up an elevator. You want to be able to drive right in and dump it there. That's such a unique difference, I think, about the asset class.
Spencer Levy
Four years ago when we were talking, it was probably the then-peak of the market in terms of capital markets values, in terms of new developments starting, new capital was discovering the space. Four years later, we talked about some of the challenges today. So I hope it doesn't take us another four years to do this show again. But, how do you see the next four years playing out, and how are you going to position yourselves during that time? So let's start with you, Liz.
Liz Schlesinger
I think to some of the trends that we've been talking about, I do think that housing, you know, home sales have reached sort of an all time low. I think eventually that will hopefully end. To your point, Spencer, I think eventually 6% rates will be relatively different to what just occurred. And I think once we start to get some more of our demand back, we're going to be in a really good spot because supply over the next few years should be relatively low, which is our biggest risk. And so I think we might have a bumpy, at the macro level, 2025, depending on your investment strategy, right? You can still increase rents if they're low relative to the market, but I think it'll be a bumpy year or two. But overall, I think we are going to start to see some recovery in the space and unfortunately, probably start to do better and therefore draw more development. And you will begin what is, as you probably know better than I, the market cycle, right? It's tricky now, but this is when you need to make the hard calls and do the investments that make sense. It always looks smart and easy in hindsight, but as you know, making those calls is not easy in the moment when they don't look so obvious. And so I think things will start to improve on the demand side eventually and then will be hopefully smooth sailing for until a bunch of developers build on us all again.
Spencer Levy
Nick, how do you see the next four years?
Nick Walker
I was going to call the bottom operationally in October of last year. I'm going to call that. That's what I was going to say. We'll see. Previous to that, we had 14 straight months of month over month continuously, sliding negative operational fundamentals. And then in the last three months we have seen a month over month improvement on that. And then you coincide that with a few things, which is development slowing down. I think peak deliveries happened in 2018, and then it's been slowly degrading since then. And now we're starting to see that start to fall off, I would say that you're going to see towards the tail end of ‘25, You have a utilization rate in storage being increasing. So more households that we never had before are starting to use storage. We understand the mobility is down which affects us, but we are getting more utilization with it. Liz, I think you gave great statistics about millennials and Gen Z's, that they're using storage more than their percentage of the population. I agree with you 100% on that. You have baby boomers that have been retiring, 10,000 daily, for I don't know how many years now, which means at some point here in the near future, they're downsizing, which they are already occurring. They have a lot of accumulation. What are they going to do with that stuff, right? And so you're starting to see that continue to be a source. The technology has allowed us to change where we're able to recapture better data, which means we could do faster, easier eyes at a better percentage. We know kind of how customers are going to react. So for me, the next four years, Spencer, I think it's going to be fantastic opportunities to get into storage. And the party ends when developers come in and just kill the operations with supply.
Liz Schlesinger
I'm much less anxious now than I am at the top of the market, right? Like when you know things are frothy. I mean, I think I mentioned this to you, but I mean, if anyone needs a shout out for Nick, Nick crushed it selling a 38 property portfolio for us in 2021, and I was so anxious in 2021 because it's like, this is so good. I've always worried that we're at the top of the market. It's really nice to know we're not at the top of the market. You know? I mean, that's the benefit of… I mean, there's always a silver lining, right? Like, I mean, it's not been the most fun year, I'll tell you that. Except that I know we're not at the top of the market as a result of that. And it's not like this anxious, all right, come on Nick. Thank you for working your magic. Let's go. Let's get this closed, kind of feeling. It's like, you know, if we don't close this deal this year, it may not be the worst thing that ever happened.
Spencer Levy
Well, the benefits of being not at the top of the market, I think, is that the good operators, the visionaries, win over the long term, much like you said, Liz. Hard to time the market, and you probably shouldn't time the market if you have a great business plan and a great approach to the business. On behalf of The Weekly Take, what a great conversation revisiting self storage with two of the true leaders of the self storage industry, starting with Liz Schlesinger, CEO of Merit Hill Capital. Thanks for coming back, Liz. Great job again.
Liz Schlesinger
Thank you for having me, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
And our old friend Nick Walker, Vice Chairman, CBRE. The leader of CBRE’s Self Storage practice. Great job, Nick.
Nick Walker
Thanks, Spencer.
Spencer Levy
For more, please visit our website CBRE.com/TheWeeklyTake. You can open up our storage archive to find related content and other episodes. We also hope you'll share this episode, as well as subscribe to the show. And please drop us a line with your feedback, questions, and comments, or any thoughts you'd like to share, including topics we ought to cover. We've got a lot more conversations in the works filled with stories and issues to unpack, including a talk with Wharton professor, organizational psychologist, and prolific author Adam Grant. We look forward to you joining us for those in the coming weeks. For now, thanks for listening. I'm Spencer Levy. Be smart. Be safe. Be well.
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